Sustainable Volunteering Archives

Person holding a sign reading volunteers needed

COVID 19’S IMPACT ON VOLUNTEERING, COMMUNITIES AND THE ECONOMY BY CLAIRE SULLY

Before the new normal was normal – that is before March 23rd, 2020, when lockdown was announced – we would evangelise about the millions of volunteers. We would note the billions of pounds their work amounted to, if equated to an economic value. We would say:

• It is estimated that in the UK 20.1 million people volunteer to support activities, events and causes. 7 in 10 people, surveyed in 2019, reveal they volunteer.

• In 2015, volunteering was worth more than £22.6bn to the UK economy. This is equivalent to about 1.2% of GDP.

• 1 in 5 (22%) people formally volunteered regularly (at least once a month) in 2017/18 (11.9 million people).

• In 2017/18, 53% of people informally volunteered at least once, and 27% of people took part in informal volunteering regularly.

It’s clear from these incredible stats that we are part of nation of doers and givers (of our time) and how- if this natural resource of people doing good together is part of a national strategy – just imagine… yes, just imagine. Then Covid 19 came and everything stopped and organisations closed and many organisations furloughed their teams. Volunteers were at home.

Now we have a major challenge in sustaining our heritage organisations and charities, keeping volunteering going and making it safe for volunteers.

Research confirms that those volunteering in the last 12 months participate in formal volunteering at least once a month, are more likely to be older, well-educated and from higher socio-economic groups. All generations are affected by Covid 19, but if a primary volunteer demographic is affected by social distancing it makes the drive to diversify volunteering even more important.

With an aging society and Covid 19 disruption, it is extremely important we sustain, value, diversify and innovate volunteering. This will not only sustain current levels of volunteering, it will open-up public participation to wider demographic profiles, benefiting health and well-being, local health systems and the economy.

Feeling connected lies at the core of the volunteer experience.

Tickbox’s Tech for Good product: Volunteer Makers enable “Connected Communities”. This creates greater numbers of volunteers and bigger impacts. It brings to the fore remote and micro-volunteering and diversifies volunteering.

For 7 years, Tickbox Tech for Good products and national pilot training programmes have shown how enabling “connected communities” to be inspired is:

• A scalable model
• Cost-effective
• A means to help organisations adapt to disruption and economic shocks
• A way to diversify volunteering

Tickbox began operating in 2007 in Somerset and is now based in Bristol, we work with clients across the UK.

Our tech-driven engagement model (Volunteer Makers) helps heritage, arts, charity and community organisations navigate economic shocks, adapt to disruption and implement organisational change. Along with the tech we have evolved training tools and learning.

During lockdown our clients have launched and extended their community and volunteer engagement, because this engagement model and its digital tools work even in lockdown with social distancing.

Learn more about Volunteer Makers in lockdown:

Oldham show how to reach people – even in lockdown

Museum Makers repeat history in lockdown

How Gloucester put itself at the forefront of innovative community engagement

by Claire Sully

Getting the community engaged and involved in arts, heritage and culture, has long been an aim of civic bodies in Gloucester.

It’s an approach that both carries economic benefits, and individual ones: letting the city council support events and facilities, and promoting physical and mental wellbeing and social inclusion for residents.

The West Country city has been a successful adopter of a new engagement model and technology – Volunteer Makers – to aid these aims.

Gloucester Heritage Forum and other community groups established Engage in Gloucester a year ago, to pool ideas and resources and use the platform provided by Tickbox, a digital tech company based just down the road in Bristol. Tickbox’s vision is to build technology products that have a positive impact on the world, Volunteer Makers has been rolled out nationally – supported by Creative England and Arts Council England.

The results achieved by Engage in Gloucester, using Volunteer Makers, not only provided community and civic projects with more public participation, but brought younger supporters into the fold – a key ambition for the Council.

“Engage in Gloucester with Volunteer Makers has not only increased the number of volunteers, it has enabled a better engagement with the public and increased the scope of their involvement with community groups and projects,” says Sarah Orton, Gloucester Culture Trust’s Community Engagement and Volunteer Officer.

Engage in Gloucester’s Volunteer Makers platform has been used by nearly 60 groups based in or near the city, ranging from Gloucester City Museum and Archives, to a community gardening group and the Girl Guides.

Larger organisations often write their own volunteer “challenges” (opportunities) for supported participation, while Sarah co-ordinates and helps smaller groups write and manage theirs.

“It has tapped into the changing face of community engagement,” Sarah explains.

“People being able to offer a few hours here and there and dip into what they want to do and where they want to do it.

“We’ve seen a big increase in young volunteers. Sometimes students looking for experience, perhaps to put on their UCCA form or to gain a foothold in the heritage and charity sector; young people doing their Duke of Edinburgh Awards and others who just want to help out, maybe in a gap year.

“The technology suits them to the ground and helps them connect, though of course, we still have plenty of older users as well, including retired people.”

Micro-volunteering is what Volunteer Makers encourages, letting supporters match their skills and interests and give time as and when they can, to help charities achieve specific goals.

“We’ve seen people grow in confidence. One regular volunteer now has paid work in the sector.

“For all, it helps that the volunteer challenges mean it isn’t a case of ‘turn up and do what we ask you’ but supporters know what their role will be, they will understand what they’re doing – and are consequently more enthusiastic about it!”

Engage in Gloucester can list many notable successes: stewarding posts for the city carnival and other festivals are filled “almost instantly”, while data inputting roles at the city archives and local history festival, both in situ and as home-based work, have also proved very popular. A drop-in counselling service filled demanding ongoing receptionist roles thanks to Engage in Gloucester and Volunteer Makers. Environmental challenges have also “flown off the shelf”, as Sarah puts it.

“Flexibility is what makes it work for users – not everyone can give regular commitments, but many want to help out as-and-when.

“Our community groups say they are seeing a very high calibre of volunteer come forward. Volunteer Makers has really made a difference to how charity and community groups and events operate here. It’s been great!”

It’s just worked really well for us” Sarah concludes.

Guest blog by Hannah Mather – Volunteer Makers: A Digital Revolution

by Claire Sully

My Name is Hannah Mather and I’m an emerging museum professional. I recently graduated with my MA in Museum Studies and have been working part time at Jarrow Hall as their Supervisor of Culture and Heritage. I’m also Chair of the North East Emerging Museum Professionals Group, a voluntary group which I founded back in April to encourage peer support for early career professionals like myself.

Managing volunteers can be difficult. People volunteer for different reasons, understanding what motivates your volunteer and working with them can be key to ensuring value exchange. It’s important to manage the expectations of both the organisation and the volunteer from the very start. As an early career professional, I love volunteering. I see many opportunities for self-development by working with more experienced professionals to develop and gain skills. It’s disheartening when you’re left feeling like a ‘spare part’ in a generic role.

The traditional volunteer application process is becoming outdated. It can be off putting when often we find that forms are not very accessible and do not allow people to cover a broad range of interests and skills. People are often asked to explain what they can bring to a role which is so generic that in fact, they don’t even know themselves what they are volunteering for.

It’s time to ditch our traditional approach to volunteering and embrace a model which can enable expectations to be managed affectively. We increasingly find that more people are wanting to volunteer, they just do not have as much time. This can be a deterrent, we’re unwilling to commit time when we are unsure on how much time we’re able to give.

Digital thinking is a good solution, one which embraces accessibility. In an age where most us have access to the internet museums have the potential to harness these tools and use them to outreach, inviting people to access their collections off site. Organisations like Tyne & Wear Museums, have been embracing this by thinking of ways in which they can blur the lines between community participation and volunteering. Using the Volunteer Makers digital software, they have made their collections more accessible and have been able to encourage people to share their favourite objects from the online collections database across their social media channels.

This digital platform has led to a rise in micro volunteering as people choose to partake in smaller tasks which take less time to complete but can be done much more frequently, creating the ‘long tail effect.’ Many smaller tasks have the potential to drive much larger projects through this. A great example of the micro volunteer challenge is “Take a photo of something you’ve enjoyed on your visit, then share it on social media.” It’s something which a lot of people already like to do, myself included. By sharing a photograph on social media, you’re sharing it with your friends and followers who can, in turn share the post with their friends and followers. The outreach on this can be huge and great for marketing.

There is also the potential, with this digital model to open a wider variation of volunteer opportunities. The tech can help to make these opportunities much more targeted, deciding what opportunities the person would be a good fit for based on the data they input when signing up, data which can be changed at any point. I first came across the model when volunteering for Tyne & Wear Museums. I had previously applied for several volunteering opportunities, and handed in countless forms, each as long and tedious as the other so when TWAM adopted the volunteer makers model it was a relief to know how straight forward the application was and I enjoyed the gamification of the site which allowed me to get started straight away and choose what appealed to me. It was a fun and creative way to volunteer. It wasn’t until sometime after this that I realised that this wasn’t just something TWAM were doing and that in fact there was a platform behind this was something which museums across the country were starting to see the benefit of.

My recent involvement with Volunteer Makers has been a very positive experience, I was invited to be part of the advisory board and my EMP group now have our very own platform which we hope to use to grow and manage our network by sharing opportunities and developing relationships with our regional museums. The Volunteer Makers platform I hope will allow NEEMPG to do what it has already aimed to do in a much more accessible way. Being involved in this project has also given me incredible opportunities, including being able to talk at the Museums Association Conference, giving the volunteer’s perspective on Volunteer Makers.

Volunteer Makers – a tool for the savvy Accredited museum by Vicky Dawson

by Claire Sully

Vicky Dawson_Heritage Consultant Vicky Dawson explains how, through the organisation-wide adoption of Volunteer Makers, museums can achieve and evidence their core strategic aims of improving how they are run and the experience of their users. These two aims are cornerstones of Museum Accreditation, the national standard scheme for museums in which over 2,500 public museums of all sizes across the United Kingdom participate.

Volunteer Makers is a national programme – supported by Arts Council England – which is pioneering a model of audience engagement using digital and blending volunteering with public participation. Accreditation is operated by Arts Council England and partner organisations in the home countries. It provides a framework against which museums benchmark their governance and resource deployment, collections management and public services. In order to become Accredited a museum must evidence that it meets the required standards across its operation and demonstrate how it identifies and plans improvements.

Volunteers play an important part in the operation of most museums today. In South West England over 30% of Accredited museums are completely run by volunteers. Even in museums with paid staff volunteers take on roles as Trustees, front of house staff, learning officers, fundraisers, exhibition developers, collections assistants, website managers – you name it, there will be a volunteer doing it. The management of this highly valuable resource is therefore essential and is one of the activities assessed in Accreditation (sections 1.4 Forward Planning and 1.7 Workforce) where Volunteer Makers can help museums deliver.

Volunteer Makers facilitates the recruitment of volunteers to carry out the activities set out in the museum’s Forward Plan. It encourages all departments within the museum to identify the skills needed and the activities involved in delivering its objectives and to break them down into ‘challenges’ which volunteers can sign up to. The customer relationship management features of the platform enable the museum not just to manage the promotion of volunteer opportunities or organise its records on individual volunteers, but also to quantify and put a value to their volunteers’ contribution – valuable data to support funding applications as well as business planning.

For the new or existing volunteer the online platform improves their experience too: it creates an accessible and efficient hub where they can find out about the opportunities available, match their skills, read up on roles and responsibilities and apply if they are interested. Once signed up, they can keep track of and evidence their involvement – a definite advantage if they are volunteering to enhance their CV and employment prospects.

By harnessing techniques more familiar to digital engagement, marketing and social media (including personalisation and gamification) to improve the experience of its users, the museum is also addressing one of the other key requirements of Accreditation and a core strategic aim of most museums: to broaden the diversity of its users (Accreditation requirement 3.1.3).

The most successful museums today are no longer regarded purely as the guardians of the nation’s or community’s heritage but also as the inspiration for personal expression and a conduit for civic involvement. Opportunities for participation, co-creation and debate bring in more diverse visitors: younger people, people who thought museums were stuffy, people from marginalised communities.

Volunteer Makers enables museums to capitalise on this trend by blending volunteering with public participation through digital engagement. It allows museums to promote and manage micro-volunteering and seamlessly encourage people to become more deeply involved as volunteers as their available time increases. This concept of the ‘long tail of volunteering’ makes museums think about volunteering in a more creative and agile manner in the face of changing demographics and increased financial pressures.

These are the two main areas where Volunteer Makers is helping museums improve and evidence their compliance with the Accreditation standard, thereby achieving core strategic aims and contributing to their resilience. To do this Volunteer Makers and Accreditation need to be firmly understood and applied across the whole museum – from the Governing Body to the cleaner, volunteer and paid staff. The recent re-launch of Wardown House Museum in Luton is testament to this.

These are exciting times for museums where the responsive will flourish, delivering with more relevant and vibrant programmes. They lead the vanguard to ensure museums are recognised once more by communities and funders as being an active and essential part of cultural life.

Vicky Dawson is a freelance museum and heritage consultant based in South West England.
@dawsonheritage

Guest blog by Hannah Rose Mather – How much time do you have?

by Claire Sully

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums is a regional museum, art gallery and archives service which manages 9 museums and galleries across Tyneside and the Archives for Tyne and Wear. They have recently launched a new, creative, way to make volunteering with them much simpler and I love it! By clicking this link you can now register online to be a volunteer.

Once registered you can browse their listed volunteer roles or challenges and choose to accept those which appeal to you. The sign up is simple and you can get started straight away.

The outreach for this is genius, it means that you can choose how much time you want to give and this can be anything from as little as a minute, an hour or a day as well as signing up to do regular volunteer work. One of the most recent challenges I accepted was taking a photo of something I enjoyed on my visit to one of their museums, I then simply had to share it on social media. I completed this challenge after finding that I enjoyed quite a few things from my visit to the Discovery Museum and shared it on Twitter.

This was a great visit and I wouldn’t expect anything less. However, the beauty of this new approach to volunteering means that you don’t even need physical access to a site in order to do some of these challenges. We live in a digital age and museums certainly know it, TWAM have created a great way to explore their collections from home.

You can “Dive” into their collections via their collections dive. This allows you to find things you probably didn’t even know existed and when you find something you like, you can share it with your friends on social media!

Volunteering can make a real difference not only to the organization which you are supporting but it can also have a positive impact on your own life. I know from my own experience how rewarding it can be to give a little. It’s a great way to fill those gaps in your work experience and gain skills. It will also make you stand out to employers as it looks great on a CV.

The Arts and Culture sector are always welcoming volunteers with a diverse skill range to work towards their own missions and vision.

A volunteer revolution – an unsung hero of the UK economy

by Claire Sully

“My prediction is that 2017 might just be the year of micro-volunteering and data donation, with cheap technologies allowing everyone to volunteer from home for short and sweet periods of time, no matter how much time they have to give.” NESTA

Around one in three of us volunteers in the UK. This ratio could be even higher if you include informal (and unrecorded) volunteering. Those acts involving our time, skills, expertise or just our sheer enthusiasm aren’t always measured. We gain skills, experience and we benefit from the social aspects of volunteering. Possibly many of us don’t consider this volunteering because we do it ad hoc, when it suits us fitting around our busy lives. We feel compelled to join in, with others, resulting in something we can all enjoy and often results in tangible benefits. There is a cultural mindset of doing good together through volunteering affecting our wellbeing and general health. This benefits our wider society in the UK- economically, it is valued in the billions.

While working across the country for Volunteer Makers, meeting and training museum teams who wish to build communities of volunteers – and the benefits that creates including diversity and sustainability – it never ceases to amaze me that amongst those professionals I work with, there is also a high percentage who volunteer themselves, in the areas they are interested in. Volunteering is ubiquitous and those working with volunteers often understand a volunteer’s perspective.

Museums, charities and arts organisations have come to understand at first-hand that finding volunteers (and keeping them) is challenging due to shifts in demographics – meaning those who come forward have different needs. Digital technology is key to finding and engaging volunteers, but requires a new approach. The old model of engaging volunteers – simply inviting someone to volunteer, then managing to match the volunteer with the activity isn’t scalable, it’s resource intensive, especially in the context that volunteers are often vital to the financial sustainability of organisations and numbers of volunteers need to increase.

The results of the mass movement of volunteering (a volunteer revolution you could say) in the UK is valued at over 25 billion pounds, an economic value comparable to significant UK PLC industries. Yet there isn’t a unifying UK-wide strategy and arguably the recognition that volunteering deserves. The opportunity is there for museums, arts and charities to learn from each other about harnessing the power of 21^st century volunteering. It has changed, and organisations have to change to keep up.

Volunteer Makers is well placed to share such learning, from a national programme of training with our tools and frameworks evolved over the past five years. Alongside this, we have been rolling out a technology platform to support organisations with the aim of growing their volunteers in a scalable and manageable way. The crucial stage is making the step to an organisational-wide engagement culture which creates the conditions for building up a substantial community of volunteers who sustain organisations now and into the future. With many Volunteer Makers Pioneers making this step, we feel this a good point in our Arts Council England supported national programme to share the learning.

Claire Sully, Volunteer Makers Programme Director

About Volunteer Makers – a National Programme for Museums supported by Arts Council England (ACE)

Volunteer Makers is a technology-driven model for engaging audiences. For those working within Arts, Charities, Heritage and Education, Volunteer Makers is a significant and sustainable way to manage, grow and inspire volunteers by blending volunteering with public participation through effective engagement.

Digital is a driver, as technology has the capacity to bring people together, gamifying engagement and rewarding and creating a value exchange for the organisation and for the volunteer. Each week, millions of people come together to run around parks across the world. These Park Runs use of technology to gamify the experience of coming together to run has a similar underlying principle to Volunteer Makers.

It is necessary for museums to find a new model to engage volunteers because the current traditional model is not sustainable. Shifts in demographics; digital transforming how organisations reach and maintain relationships with volunteers; and the need to find sustainable financial models driven by added value from volunteers are the impetuses for the new model.

Museums recognise that to be sustainable they must take an organisation-wide approach to creating an engagement culture e.g. engaging volunteers goes beyond the volunteer co-ordination/management function.

This is a museum-led idea that will have a wider impact on other sectors including libraries, arts, charities, communities and health. The museums themselves have called it Blended Volunteering – blending your volunteering with public participation, marketing and digital. Seeing volunteering beyond traditional roles, blending regular volunteering with micro-volunteering. Seeing your audience as supporter as visitor and volunteer.

Overall Aims of the ACE Volunteer Makers National Programme for Museums:

– Inspire and support museums to maximise impact of their engagement with volunteers.

– Encourage leadership and workforce in museums to be creative and highly skilled in their strategic volunteer engagement thinking.

– Introduce a model of sustainable volunteering leading to cultural transformation in resilience, fundraising and volunteer diversity.

– Provide training tools, a volunteer engagement-planning framework and digital technology to support volunteer activity going forward.

Learning from Volunteer Makers – a national conference in 2017

Volunteer Makers national conference is a fringe conference on November 17^th, 2017, part of Museums Association Conference at Manchester Central Convention Centre. The conference is called: Pioneering Volunteering Makers
– A new era for engaging audiences.

A third of people in the UK are volunteering and the value of volunteering is worth billions. With shifts in demographics, digital and funding models a new way of thinking is necessary if museums are to engage volunteers in a way to sustain and diversify their audiences.

This is a chance for museums to further participate in Volunteer Makers and understand the benefits of Blended and Micro-Volunteering and how this affects the workforce now and into the future.

The Volunteer Makers conference will hear from the museums themselves who are pioneering Volunteering Makers and the steps they have taken to create an organisational-wide engagement culture and implement new thinking in volunteer engagement. If you wish to attend the conference, please get in touch.

Testimonials

‘We know that people still want to give their time to volunteer, but also that that time needs to give something back. Museums need to offer more than just operations or events. They need to offer support, interaction and sustainability across the range of their activities. Volunteer Makers offers an intelligent answer to this problem. The app in particular not only makes it easier for people to find out how they can help, but addresses their interests or availability so that everybody wins. It’s volunteering for the modern world. And it’s going to have massive benefits in communities across the country’.

John Orna-Ornstein, previous Director of Museums, ACE

‘The implementation of a more publicly engaged volunteer strategy is already taking root. The strategy is being formulated by the Visitor and Volunteer Officer in collaboration with relevant colleagues and seeks to create a more joined up approach by utilising the Marketing and Engagement Team. For instance, one recent press released asked visitors ‘Can you help Chelmsford Museum’s search for Florence Attridge?’ and asked residents to respond with any information regarding a recent Museum acquisition of a British Empire Medal (civil division), which was awarded in 1946 to Florence Attridge of Chelmsford for services as head of the winding shop at Marconi’s New Street Factory during WWII. This initiative came after two members of the museum staff attended the Volunteer Makers London and South-East Seminar, which has caused the Museum to reassess its perception of the role of volunteers in the museum. We now recognise that a volunteer is not only someone who gives one day a week to help with regular activities, but can be anyone who gives their time – however small – to help with museum projects, promotion and engagement’.

Will Boisseau, Chelmsford Museum

‘Everyone was buzzing and excited after the session, and I can honestly say I have never had such heart felt positive feedback about a change of system before!’

Jessica Hartshorn, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum

The rise of micro-volunteering and a very British volunteer revolution

by Claire Sully

Digital and social media makes it easy for volunteers to actively engage with their favourite museums, arts organisations and charities, while many more people are prepared to give short bursts of time rather than a longer term commitment to volunteering. Put the two together (digital and short bursts of volunteering activity) you have the rise of micro-volunteering.

Micro-volunteering doesn’t always require digital technology however, see the examples below, but it is an important impetus behind the popularity of micro-volunteering in the UK. Engaging volunteers in this way can create a long tail effect, simply driving the numbers up with many more people giving shorter periods of time creating more volunteering time overall.

Micro-volunteering can be performed remotely and is particularly attractive to younger volunteers. Stats show that more and more young people want to volunteer, but in a way that suits their lifestyle. The UK really is the champion of micro-volunteering. More than half of all micro-volunteering activities took place in the UK during 2015. Australia (33%) saw the next highest interest in micro-volunteering in 2015, while in the US it is growing, but from the low base of 3%.

Innovation foundation Nesta has predicted 2017 to be “the year of microvolunteering” – and lots of organisations are keen to use this flexible approach to 21st century volunteering. In England, 15.9m individuals volunteer frequently from an overall population of 53.9m. The value of this has been estimated to be between £23.9 billion (The Office for National Statistics) and £53 billion (DWP). The potential of effectively engaging volunteers is clear, while it can be argued that in this country we are experiencing a volunteer revolution.

Volunteer Makers is currently running a national programme promoting Blended Volunteering, supported by Arts Council England. Our own technology can deliver both regular long-term volunteering with micro-volunteering. We are looking to prove a link between growing a community through micro-volunteering and increasing the numbers of people giving a more long-term commitment to supporting organisations.

To celebrate micro-volunteering day here is our shout-out to micro-volunteering champions we are working with and who are connecting with and experiencing a real value exchange with their volunteers.

Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums run nine galleries and museums across the North East. They launched their Volunteer Maker platform just a few weeks ago and are already seeing micro-volunteer numbers grow rapidly into the hundreds. We particularly like these inspired micro-volunteering challenges:

Activity: Fact of the day
What’s involved: Help their History team by contributing to a crowdsourced collection of interesting historical facts about the North East which they will use to create new and distinct content for their social media channels.
Get involved: Here

Activity: Log a wildlife sighting
What’s involved: Record and submit local wildlife sightings while out and about.
Get involved: Here

Activity: Donate your junk!
What’s involved: A call out for your recyclables and old, useless tech!
Get involved: Here

Corinium Museum is located at the heart of Cirencester, the ‘Capital of the Cotswolds’. Their principal collection consists of the highly significant finds from the Roman town of Corinium. Growing their community of volunteers is at the heart of the museum’s vision and here is how they are doing it, on their recently launched Volunteer Makers platform.

Activity Research a Mystery Object
What’s involved: The museum is looking for researchers to help identify mystery objects in their collection. Your research will help spread new light on the collections, create a better understanding of the material the museum holds and give you an opportunity to practise your research skills
Get involved: Here

Activity: Be a garden volunteer
What’s involved: The museums is looking for a volunteer to help maintain and develop our Roman Garden.
Get involved: Here

Activity: Trial a trail
What’s involved: The challenge is to help he museum trial a new gallery trail at the design stage for museum families and schools.
Get involved: Here

Wardown House Museum and Art Gallery has been pioneering micro-volunteering for many years. After setting up their Museum Makers platform over 5 years ago, in the first two years the museum grew from having 40 occasional volunteers to having more than 120 active volunteers that work on direct museum projects involving the collections, events, talks and tours. Added to that they built up a community of 1500 online Museum Makers who support and advocate the museum through mainly microvolunteering activities. Having a successful community-driven museum has helped this museum secure £3.5m capital funding and refurbished the museum.

Activity: Create a Pinterest board for all your ideas for the museum
What’s involved: What would you put in your ideal exhibition? Hats? Toys? Luton life? Build your dream museum exhibition on Pinterest and then share it with Museum Makers Pinterest account.
Get involved: Here

Activity: Bookplate Illustration
What’s involved: A bookplate is a small print or decorative label pasted into the inside cover of a book, to indicate its owner. The museum is looking for a bookplate design that will go on open display in the Library.
Get involved: Here

Activity: Sign up as a School Museum Maker
What’s involved: Schools can become Museum Makers to, so sign up today. There are lots of ways to get involved as a Museum Maker:

Visiting the museum as a class or whole school
Inform the shape of our schools offer to keep it relevant and fresh
Supporting the development of new sessions by being a pilot school
Taking part in educational sessions at the museum
Attending our Schools Museum Maker forum
FundraisingGet involved: Here

Microvolunteering under the spotlight

by Claire Sully

Innovation foundation Nesta has predicted 2017 to be “the year of microvolunteering” – and more and more organisations are now using this flexible approach to 21st century volunteering.

With National Microvolunteering Day coming up this Sunday, the topic is covered in an article in today’s Guardian – with some handy advice on what to think about when using microvolunteering in your organisation.

Microvolunteering is a key component of the Volunteer Makers model – though we see it as something you can seamlessly blend with more traditional volunteering rather than a stand-alone activity.

With the UK leading the way in microvolunteering (more than half of all microvolunteering worldwide happens here) it is a strategy that needs serious consideration as the demands of volunteers change and new generations bring different expectations of how they engage with you.

We’ll be writing more on microvolunteering in the coming days, or get in touch with us direct if you have any questions about how Volunteer Makers and microvolunteering can work for your organisation.

Museum trends show need for blended, digital volunteer approach

by Claire Sully

Screen Shot 2017-04-06 at 14.50.11 A major report into the state of the museum sector shows mixed picture of rising visitor numbers but falling funding – with a shifting relationship between museums and their audiences, the digital revolution and a move towards socially-engaged practice shaping the sector’s future.

The Museum Association’s Museums in the UK Report 2017 shows that trends that led to the development of the Volunteer Makers approach are continuing to impact museums. Read more

The Volunteer Revolution

by Claire Sully

Volunteer Makers (VM) is a training and technology programme for arts, heritage and charities that is a rethinking of how organisations are working with volunteers.

It is driven by the principles of the digital revolution, but taking this virtual engagement into the reality of real-world working together.

From January to March we are running a pilot programme, giving free support and training to a limited number of organisations to create or build on their volunteer engagement and work with the Volunteer Makers online platform.

This is part of a Volunteer Makers pilot project to inform demand for the platform before a national roll-out from July 2016. Our results will be shared with the sector.

As a new model of volunteer engagement, Volunteer Makers is presenting the value of volunteering in perhaps a different way, which is making some organisations shift their thinking about how they work. It is based on research and development work we have carried out during the past 4 years. Read more